Friday, November 20, 2015

We don't know how lucky we are

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 18.)

I spent much of the weekend mowing
lawns and raking up leaves and other garden debris that had accumulated while
my wife and I were on holiday in the United States. The only thing disturbing
the peace – that is, once I’d turned the mower off – was the barking of a
neighbour’s dog.

Meanwhile, a world away, the
residents of Paris were locked indoors, reluctant to venture outside for fear
of another terrorist attack. There could hardly have been a more striking reminder
of how blessed we are, living in this remote and serene corner of the globe.

We can only hope that people
who migrate to New Zealand value and respect the fact that ours is a liberal,
humane, inclusive and relatively safe society, and that they commit themselves
to helping keep it that way. After all, it’s presumably a key reason why they
come here.

Not that we can afford to be
smug. We are part of a connected, global society and it’s impossible not to
share the anguish and anxiety that the people of France are going through right
now. Neither can we disconnect ourselves from international efforts to confront
and conquer the menace that is Islamist terrorism.

The Islamic State is a
uniquely challenging adversary, especially given that its followers appear to
have no fear of death – in fact, embrace the prospect of martyrdom. But the
fight against them is our fight too.

The Islamist assault on
liberal democratic values – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, women’s
equality, the rights of minorities generally – is a threat to us all. We can’t
pretend it’s not our concern simply because it hasn’t (yet) directly affected
us.

Recent events have sharpened
my awareness of other things besides our comfortable isolation in the southwest
Pacific. Four weeks in the US reminded me once again how insignificant we are
in world affairs.

I heard New Zealand mentioned
once in the news media. That was when I was listening to National Public Radio
late at night and heard a BBC news bulletin that referred briefly to the
pending Rugby World Cup final between the All Blacks and Australia.

Small reminders of home
intruded on us in unexpected, random ways. In Boston’s North Side, my wife
spied a delivery man wheeling a trolley laden with Yealands Estate wine from
Marlborough.

In the same city, I heard Weather With You by Crowded House being
played as the background to a radio weather forecast. And twice in public
places we heard Lorde’s hit song Royals
– once in a Subway outlet in the small town of Tejon, in California’s Central
Valley, and again in the same state when we were eating halibut and chips on
the deck of a seaside café at Morro Bay (a charming spot, by the way).

People have asked me whether
the RWC got any coverage in the US media. Fat chance. Rugby may be the
fastest-growing sport in America (albeit off a very low base), but the media were
interested only in American football, basketball and baseball.

Even universal sports such as
golf and tennis rated barely a mention amid the swathes of coverage devoted to
domestic sport, including college (i.e. university) football, which has a huge
following. In most of the bars we drank in, massive TV screens were permanently
tuned to sports channels showing the three popular codes.

(I love American bars all the
same. I like the way people sit at the bar and strike up conversations with
their neighbours. And American beer is superb. Thanks to the craft beer
revolution, the days when the only options were ghastly mass-produced beers
such as Miller and Budweiser – the beers they serve in Hell – are now but a grim
memory.)

Americans are equally
parochial when it comes to general news. Only the most sensational
international events, such as the explosion that brought down a Russian
airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, elbowed their way into news bulletins.
Mostly it was wall-to-wall coverage of the race for the presidency, with endless commentary and analysis of the main contenders.

I was reminded of a comment I
heard years ago from a New Zealand educationist who had lived for several years
in the US. Many Americans had no interest in the outside world, he said,
because America was their world.

This view is supported by
passport statistics. As recently as 1989, only 3 per cent of Americans held
passports, although the number has increased greatly over the past 20 years
(it’s now closer to 40 per cent, compared to roughly 75 per cent for New
Zealanders).

New Zealanders are certainly
far more aware than Americans of the outside world. We have to be, because
we’re at its mercy in a way bigger, more powerful countries are not.

Our isolation makes us
compulsive travellers, hungry for experience of other places. Yet our concerns
are often just as parochial as those of the Americans.

After four weeks away, my
wife and I returned to a country that was still agonising over the same issue
that dominated political debate when we left: the incarceration of people who
are technically New Zealand citizens (although they regard themselves as Australians,
in many cases having been brought up there) in what Peter Dunne rightly labelled
concentration camps.

Australia’s treatment of
New Zealand detainees is a disgrace, to be sure, and provides further proof that the supposed
Anzac bond is a fallacy. It also demonstrates that by comparison with ours, Australia's penal and judicial processes are harsh and vindictive. They learned well from their former colonial masters.But to put things in perspective, on a scale of one to
10 Australia's treatment of detainees is a two, or at most a three, compared with what the French were subjected
to last weekend.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.